William Craddock - Be Not Content: A Subterranean Journal

Be Not Content

A Subterranean Journal

William J. Craddock

Transreal Books
Los Gatos, California
May 14, 2012 edition

Be Not Content is Copyright 1970 by William Craddock. The first edition appeared in print, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City , New York. The new ebook and print editions appeared in May, 2012, Transreal Books, Los Gatos, California, by arrangement with Teresa Craddock. The Introduction is copyright Rudy Rucker, 2012. Cover photo is copyright by Teresa Craddock, 2012.

ISBN-13: 9780984758531

www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks

This book is for Carole and Peredu

With special thanks to

Teresa Craddock

Introduction, by Rudy Rucker

Be Not Content is a coming-of-age novel set in San Jose, California, in the mid 1960sdescribing William Craddocks experiences as a young acidhead.

This is a deep and well-written book, a unique chronicle of the earliest days of the great psychedelic upheaval. Its filled with warmth and empathy, tragic at times, and very funny in spotsreminding me of William Burroughss Yage Letters and Phillip K. Dicks A Scanner Darkly , two other wastrel masterpieces where laughter plays counterpoint against the sad oboes of doom.

Billy Craddock was born July 16, 1946, and grew up in Los Gatos, California, the son of William and Camille Craddock. The family was well-off, with William Sr. an executive. As a teenager, Billy said he expected to die at twenty-two, but that he wanted to be a Hells Angel and a published author by the time he was twenty-one.

At nineteen he was in fact a prospect for the Hells Angels, and he rode his chopper up to Oakland for a party in a bar. A vicious fight broke out, with knives and chains. Billy escaped out the bathroom window and decided not to be in the Angels after all. Instead he joined the equally outlaw Night Riders motorcycle club of San Jose for a few years.

During his biker and acidhead times, Craddock was also an on-and-off student at San Jose State, an English major. Early on, he managed to sell an article about motorcycle gangs to the magazine Easyriders under the pen-name William James. And he wrote some columns for a local paper, the Los Gatos Times Observer .

But that was just a warm-up. Billy finished writing his classic psychedelic novel three months after turning twenty-one. Be Not Content reads as if written by a mature professional. Its as if all those trips aged Craddock by dozens of years, and he mentions this possibility:

So much lived-time used up in so little clock-time and the world still pretty much the same and us still pretty much the same except for having grown even farther away from the straight-world and its children, having grown hairier on the outside and older-younger on the inside because of the passage of so much lived-time Decrepit, old, tired minds, said [the narrators friend] Baxtor, being carried around in twenty-year-old bodies. A ludicrous spectacle. People have been conditioned to expect some sort of body-mind correlation. How will they react to the sight of a drooling, senile twenty-five-year-old being wheeled into the park by attendants? What excuse would you give? You couldnt say, Well, theres nothing really wrong with him. Hes just old. While we waited for senility we made treks back and forth, from San Jose to Sur, to San Francisco, to Berkeley, to L.A. and into Mexico back to San Jose where we sometimes went to school or got jobs and then quit or got fired. We talked for whole nights far into the next day, about experiences and religion, Zen, Tibet and the Tao, prison and our friends in it, philosophy and the stars, insanity and music, new drugs and ancient drugs rediscovered, love and cops, bullshit and its universal appeal, poets and dictators, power and the cosmos, and it was all so real and new.

Be Not Content appeared in a Doubleday Projections edition in 1970. What would Craddock write next?

In a note written for Gale Contemporary Authors , he reported, Doubleday tentatively accepted Be Not Content in 1968. While waiting for the anticipated wild joy of actual publication I wrote a second and much longer novel (intended as a sequel and wrap-up of Be Not Content ) entitled Backtrack , which followed the first book's main characters through the disillusioning reentry years immediately after the winter of 1967 and the death of hippie-hope. This grand opus was rejected after due consideration.

In 1972, Doubleday instead published Craddocks downbeat Twilight Candelabra , a novel involving coke, Satanism and a murder. Craddock may have been trying to write a novel more in tune with what his editors imagined the commercial market to be. His next novel was The Fall of Because, a satire overlaying a serious allegorical treatment of modern magick. This one was rejected by Doubleday.

Craddock finished the first draft of Be Not Content in September, 1967, and two months later he married Carole Anne Bronzich for a year and a half. In 1975 he married for the second time, to Teresa Lynne Thorne, a native of San Jose. Thornes father was a lawyer whod represented George Jackson, the Soledad brothers, and the Hells Angels. Her parents took Billys hippie/biker looks in stride.

Billy had dated Teresa for awhile, checking out if shed be someone he could live with. Teresa tells a story of Billy accompanying her to shopping mall. He told me he wanted to wait in the parking lot, says Teresa. So I left him there in the car with a glass of water and the window openlike a dog?and when I got back from my shopping, he told me he was on acid. You could never tell when Billy was high. He didnt show it.

Craddock found a novel way to get engaged. He gave Teresa a copy of Be Not Content , and when she asked for an autograph, he wrote his marriage proposal on the fly-leaf.

In 1975 the newlyweds spent some time as the caretakers of an empty mansion above Los Gatos. Billy wrote a somewhat autobiographical California novel, The Fading Grass . For whatever reason it too was deemed unpublishable. Finally, in 1976, aged thirty, Billy wrote one more novel, A Passage of Shadows , and that one also failed to sell.

At this point he abandoned his career as a novelist. He drifted away from psychedelics and eventually became involved with hard drugs. He made a little money writing for the Santa Cruz Good Times , a column a week, at $100 a column.

Its not the publishing that matters, Billy would gamely tell Teresa. Its the writing.

I got my first copy of Be Not Content in 1972, shortly after taking a job as an assistant professor of mathematics at a small college in upstate New York. I think I may have found the novel in a hip bookshop at Dupont Circle, Washington, DC. I quickly began to idolize Craddock. I had my own memories of the psychedelic revolution, and when reading Be Not Content I felt Yes . This is the way it was. This guy got it right.

I wrote Craddock a fan letter, enclosing what was at that time my sole publication, a technical math paper on higher infinities. As if. Billy wrote a friendly note back, saying that hed only passed his high-school geometry class by cheating wildly off the girl in front of him, but that he was happy to know someone was reading him over on the other side of the island.

The years went by. In 1986, my wife, three kids and I moved to Los Gatos, California. I had a job as a professor of math and computer science at San Jose State. Soon after arriving I saw one of Craddocks columns in the Good Times free weekly paper.

I learned that Craddock had grown up in my new town, had attended the same high school where my children were going, that hed gone to the very same San Jose State college were I now worked, and that wed been born within a few months of each other. My mystic double! I thought of seeking him out, but I wasnt sure how to startand I had the feeling that, as writers, wed inevitably meet without having to plan it.

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